It hurts less than it did...but I miss him very much. Still looking for two bowls when it's time to make dinner, looking for him when I come back from a walk with Chip.

Baxter's best stories were his numerous escapes. For about the first year--maybe two?--that I had him, he continuously found ways to escape from a backyard that had proven infranqueable to two previous dogs. Most escapes involved a minor chase around the block--his go-to escape was to the supply of feral cat food around the corner. He did not reach high speeds, so once spotted his re-capture was a simple affair, not to mention that he never seemed to mind being brought home. His escape skills go against everything I came to believe about his intelligence and I have never reconciled the two (Chip presents the same disconnect, in reverse). Anyway, after a year or two, I gave up on securing the yard and he was no longer allowed to go off leash in the backyard. A couple years after that, he had his bout of vertigo that left him with a permanent fear of going down steps, so the yard ceased to be an option. But oh, the panic he induced and the stories he created in his three or four sustained escapes. 

Second-best, I'd say, was the escape I didn't even realize had occurred until it was over, and which went through the front door instead of the back. I had somehow failed to completely close my front door one night and at some point overnight it blew open. It must have been a Saturday or the summer, because I was blissfully asleep when I got a phone call the next morning from someone at Ochsner hospital, which is a couple blocks behind my house. Baxter had been apprehended trying to enter ther maternity ward ON THE 5TH FLOOR.  Apparently, Baxter had ventured out the front door, plodded over to the hospital garage (one block behind my house), and then climbed his way around to the top, at which point--drawn to the smell of fresh milk?--he decided to enter the hospital proper, in the maternity ward. "Oh my god!" I cried, on the phone, as I jumped up and found the door wide open and Chip still next to me--"can you wait two minutes? I'll come get him!" "No need," said the caller. "We just had an outpatient appointment and I have to drive by your house on my way home. I'll drop him off." (His address was on his tag.) "Oh... ok!" I said, "thank you!" And that is how a woman, at least 8 months pregnant, and her husband, came to drive by in their truck and deliver a completely unbothered Cocker Spaniel to my door one sunny New Orleans morning....

 If patterns of thoughts create grooves in the brain, then I imagine that an MRI would reveal a Baxter shaped indentation of worn neuronal patterns in mine. Open door coming home: where is Baxter? Mealtime: put out two bowls. While working: stroke Baxter gently with toes. Getting up from desk: check to see where Baxter is so I don't step on him. At least once per hour: big Spaniel hug just to make sure he knows he's loved/just to make sure I know I'm loved. Each time now that I think that thing or do that thing according to the usual synaptic groove, there is a little shock when I remember that I can't anymore. I imagine the shocks will inevitably condition me to stop having these impulses and thus I will gradually no longer need them, as I internalize his absence. Not sure if I want that to happen or not. In some sense, since he's not with me in his big ol fluffy goofy body, I at least like the fact that he is so deeply imprinted on my mind.

 The vertiginous drop of the soul/heart/spirit upon coming home, opening the front door and seeing what your dog is up to/awaiting the welcome and then...remembering that he's not there anymore. ever.

 When Sancha died I used this space to remember things about her. The cycle repeats, we (pet owners) are like Charlie Brown with the football, except we get to spend 10-15 years each time scoring touchdowns and THEN inevitably God/Biology pulls the ball away and we, no less vulnerable than the last time, fall face first into grief.

I knew Baxter would not live forever and yet, because he had been at the brink of death once and heading in that direction several times more, and had each time stopped short, done a 180, and demanded a cheeseburger...I did think, in a part of my mind that reason does not touch, that he would live forever. And he did...until yesterday, September 16, 2022. He could have lived more, but he could not have lived well, and so I made a decision. I am fortunate that in all my great grief--and I am so, so sad--I do not have any doubts about that decision. Even when I made the wrong decision and prolonged Sancha's life through an ultimately futile surgery and 5 days of agony...I still didn't blame myself for it. But now I know I did the right thing, I know Baxter was ready to go. I don't want to explain his decline here right now. I want to use this space to remember the things that I need to remember as I need to remember them, and right now I want to remember him in all his quirky, goofy, clumsy, lovable, huggable, ever-hungry glory. 

More memories to come. I miss hugging him. I miss him following me everywhere, the way he just lumbered over to wherever I was going and then, with his big sigh and klunk, plopped down at my feet. Never asking for attention (although always happy to have it), just fulfilling what he clearly perceived as part of ht e dog contract, which was to be at my feet. Chip sat at my feet today in the living room, which he never did, and I'm not one for getting all new age-y about things, but it's hard not to think that (my theory) Chip knew I needed that today and/or (mom's version) something of Baxter's spirit has entered Chip. Also there was a weird patch of rainbow in the sky--not stretching across the sky, more like a rainbow-cookie, that I'm sure could be explained by meteorologists or physicists but given that neither mom nor I had ever seen anything like that before, did also plausibly seem to be angel Baxter.